Sleep

in case you were wondering, the quote in my poem is from play crack the sky by brand new.

Drinking antique green tea out of a [too big for my hands]

neon blue cup. Feel like I need to contemplate life... Tell everyone that Socrates is dead wrong. Plato doesn't have anything on me. [but I'd be a liar; and I don’t know where I'm going..]

Life is filled with moments like when your six-year-old brother talks about how the sun looks like an apricot in the sky and looks so close that you can pick it out and eat it... and how good God is for making it that way. And you want to tell him all about life and death and heartbreak... and how you don’t even know that much about God. But all he knows is that our dog died last week and one of the hens had baby chicks last night. So you just take his hand and say,

"God is good."

You're graduating today.

And I wish I could feel how big it was. I wish I knew what makes it special, and how you coloured with crayons in kindergarten and read the biggest books and kissed all the girls inside the slide that swirled around.

When I'm discouraged, I just lay in the dark and talk in rhymes about how I want to be in your bed when it's still warm from you sleeping there. I want to paint rooms with you, and drive for hours with you. I'd even settle for drowning in the ocean with you.

Hate how there is a window screen between us and when I whisper to you it sifts it through like warm summer sand and the point never seems to make it across. Yesterday I found my dusty, old telescope in the garage and took it out in broad daylight and looked through it in every possible direction just to find an answer.

All that I found out was that the sun hurts my eyes, and trees look like a mottled Van Gogh painting worth more money than I've ever heard of.

Want you to know how at our next family dinner they will ask me to say a prayer and I know exactly what I want to say,

"Dear God, if you're on top of the peas or even the cucumber-rings... listening--can you tell him that I love him? Can't you send an angel in my place and kiss him for me?

Canada is farther than the distance between my thighs and the spaces between my ribs.

I just want to touch him with my mouth."

I swear I'll say it and when I do-- I'm going to run.

I'll knock my chair over and run away. Run outside in the rain and fall down on the gravel and lay there.

Lay there and stay there.

And everyone is going to miss you, sweetheart. Everyone in the world.

I'm going to fill bowls full of tears for you...

I'm going to pay that man on the corner to play guitar for you.

But for now I think I'm going to fall asleep on top of this flowered diary I've been writing in and have a million dreams filled with you singing and everything that reminds me of you.

"I wish for one more day to give my love and repay debts..."

This is the end.

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